August 21, 2015

Strange But True!

Q. When the United States Postal Service (USPS) issued its new “Brontosaurus” stamp in 1989, it came under criticism from the Smithsonian Institute and others. What was the issue?

A. The Institute accused the USPS of favoring “cartoon nomenclature to scientific nomenclature” in rejecting the correct name “Apatosaurus” (deceptive lizard) — dating back to the 1970s — for “Brontosaurus” (thunder lizard), says Michael Balter in Science magazine.

Recently, paleontologist Emanuel Tschopp weighed in on the matter with his “dinosaur-sized study,” the most comprehensive one to date of the family tree Diplodocidae, to which both of these monstrous beasts belong.

In examining 80 skeletons and 477 skeletal features, Tschopp found that “USPS got it right”: these plant-eating dinos with their distinctive long necks and tails differed from Apatosaurus “in at least a dozen key characters across the skeleton” and possessed some features that Apatosaurus lacked. His conclusion: These differences are enough for Brontosaurus to have its own name.

As paleobiologist Philip Mannion sums it up: “Brontosaurus has a prominent place in the public imagination. It can only be a good thing that it is back with us... It shows that science develops through time and that it's possible to change our minds, even about long-held views.”

Q. How many really big numbers are you sitting on? Did you know that you were a millionaire last year? And are you over age 33?

A. Each day you live there are 24 hours, times 60 minutes per hour times 60 seconds per minute, for 86,400 seconds per day. Multiplying 86,400 seconds per day times 365 days per year yields 31,536,000 seconds in each of your years: You are an annual seconds millionaire. And if you're at least 33 years of age, you become a seconds billionaire.

Now if you're lucky enough to live to be 100, you clock a total of 3,153,600,000. And if you're fantastically lucky (emphasis on “fantasy”) to have a dollar for every second of your long life, you'd be a very wealthy multi-billionaire indeed.

Q. Why do we gesture as we talk?

A. Gestures not only help us transmit our thoughts to others but they help us formulate those thoughts, says psychologist David McNeill as reported by Arika Okrent in Mental Floss magazine.

So profound are gestures that people use them even if they've never seen them before: people who have been blind since birth do gesturing. And people gesture to someone on the phone even though the other person can't see them do so.

“When speech is disrupted — by stuttering for example — so is gesturing,” Okrent adds.

When there's a mismatch between gestures and speech, it can be a valuable tipoff as to the underlying mental processes.

For example, as psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow discovered in her research, when children until about age 7 are given a tall glass and a shorter, wider one with the same amount of water, they think that the shorter glass contains less water.

“When asked to explain their reasoning, some children will say, ‘This one is shorter,' while gesturing that the glass is wider..., showing they subconsciously grasp that both dimensions are important. Teachers who can spot these mismatches can tell when a student is ready to understand the relationship between height, width and volume.”

Previous columns:

• Strange But True!, 08-14-2015
• Strange But True!, 08-07-2015
• Strange But True!, 07-31-2015
• Strange But True!, 07-24-2015
• Strange But True!, 07-17-2015
• Strange But True!, 06-26-2015
• Strange But True!, 06-19-2015
• Strange But True!, 06-12-2015